I Am Begging You to Read This

On Muslims, and Jews, and Shibboleths, and the Olympic Sport of Collective Punishments

I remember September 12th, 2001, with the kind of clarity that only trauma produces.

Not the trauma of the attack itself, although that was real and shared by everyone who was alive and conscious that week. The other trauma. The one that started about six hours after the towers fell, when it became clear, very quickly, that the people who looked like me were now going to spend the next decade, maybe two, maybe forever, paying a tax we did not owe for a crime we did not commit.

I am a Palestinian American. I am culturally Muslim. I have a name that telegraphs both. And on September 12th, 2001, that combination became, overnight, a kind of provisional citizenship in my own country, the kind where you have to keep your papers handy and your tone modulated and your face arranged into a permanent expression of “I promise I am not what you think I am.” Anti-Arab racism existed before 9/11. Islamophobia existed before 9/11. The West has been suspicious of, condescending to, and periodically violent toward Arabs and Muslims for centuries. None of that was new. What was new was the social permission to say it out loud. The license. The sense that suspicion was now patriotic, that hostility was now justified, that the burden of proof had shifted permanently onto every Arab and every Muslim to demonstrate, continuously, in every interaction, that they were not the enemy.

It was exhausting in a way that is hard to describe to people who have never had to do it. The constant low-grade performance of harmlessness. The volunteering of your moderate opinions before anyone asked. The watching of other Arabs on TV being asked to denounce things they had nothing to do with, and the knowing that you would be asked to do the same the next time someone shoved a microphone in your face. The way your name became a thing people repeated back to you slowly, testing it, weighing it. The TSA. God, the TSA. The “random” selections that were never random. The looks on planes. The way strangers’ eyes would land on you and then slide away with a calculation behind them that you could feel even when you couldn’t see it.

Before I go any further, I want to say two things flat out, so the reader who came in hot does not have to wait for either of them:

The first is that I want Palestinians to be free, safe, and at home in the land they have lived on for generations, with full sovereignty over their own lives and full equality with everyone else who lives there, and nothing in this essay is a step back from that.

The second is that I want the same thing for Jewish people. I want a place on this earth where Jews can live without having to apologize for existing or justify their presence to anyone, because the case for a Jewish refuge was made in blood by the people who tried to exterminate them, and the case has not gotten weaker since.

I am deliberately not naming the political form that delivers both of those things, because I do not think the political form is the floor.

The floor is the people.

The floor is that both people get to live, in safety, in dignity, in their own home, on the land that is home to both of them, and any political arrangement that delivers that is one I am willing to argue for, and any political arrangement that does not is one I am not. Stay with me or don’t, but do not misread me.

But back to 9/11 and the conflation. Oh, the conflation… the endless, lazy, vicious conflation of one and a half billion people with nineteen hijackers.

The way “Muslim” and “terrorist” became, in the mouths of cable news hosts and congressmen and cab drivers and coworkers, near-synonyms. The way every Arab, every Muslim, every brown person with a beard or a hijab or a name that ended in the wrong sound, was now a representative of a death cult they had spent their entire lives trying to distance themselves from, a death cult that had murdered far more Muslims than non-Muslims, a death cult that the vast majority of the world’s Muslims found as repugnant as anyone else did. None of that mattered.

The conflation was the point. The conflation was useful. The conflation justified things that needed justifying.

Here is the part I want to talk about, though, because it is the part that has stayed with me for twenty-five years and that has become unexpectedly relevant in the last two.

In that period, in the worst months and years after 9/11, when the air in America was thick with permission to hate us, some of the best people who stepped up, the people who showed up, the people who said out loud “this is wrong, this is not who we are, these people are our neighbors and we will not let this happen on our watch,” were Jewish.

Not all of them. Not most of them, even. But a significant, principled, brave minority of American Jews and Israelis I knew personally got it immediately and viscerally, because they had a long, painful institutional memory of what happens when an entire people is held responsible for the actions of a few, and they were not going to stand by and watch it happen to someone else. They wrote op-eds. They spoke at mosques. They organized. They showed up at airports when people were being detained. They invited Arab families to Shabbat dinner. They were, to use a word I do not use lightly, righteous.

And some of the worst people, the people who were most enthusiastically on board with the conflation, the people who wanted the wars and the surveillance and the registry and the bans and the torture, were also Jewish. American Jews and Israelis who saw 9/11 as a vindication, as an opportunity, as proof that the rest of the West finally understood what they had been saying all along about Arabs and Muslims, which was that we were a problem to be managed, contained, surveilled, and if necessary, eliminated.

Both of these things were true at the same time. The same community, the same religion, the same history, produced both the most principled non-Arab, non-Muslim defenders of Arab and Muslim Americans and some of the most virulent enemies.

It was a contradiction that I sat with for a long time, and I eventually came to understand it the way I understand all such contradictions, which is that communities are not monoliths, that traumatized populations produce both empathy and cruelty in unpredictable ratios, that the lessons of history are available to anyone who wants to learn them and ignored by anyone who finds them inconvenient.

I am writing this in April of 2026.

I am writing this because the inversion has come, and it has come faster and more completely than I would have predicted, and I want to say something to my Jewish and Israeli friends who are living through it now, because I have been through the other side of this thing and I know what it feels like and I know what is coming.

I am not comparing Judaism to jihadism. I am not comparing Israelis to Al-Qaeda. I am not comparing Jewish people to terrorists.

I am comparing a specific small group of religious and political fanatics who have captured a state and are using ancient texts to justify mass violence to another specific small group of religious and political fanatics who tried to do the same thing twenty-five years ago, and the comparison is structural, and it is exact, and it is the most accurate one I have: Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition of messianic settler fanatics, his finance minister who calls himself a proud fascist, his national security minister who was convicted of supporting a terrorist organization before being put in charge of the police, his cabinet of men who quote Torah passages about exterminating Amalek as justification for the bombing of children, are the Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda of this moment.

I do not say this lightly. I say it because the comparison is the most accurate one I have, and because I have watched the machinery of it for long enough now to recognize the shape.

They are a death cult that has hijacked a religion and a nation and a people and turned them into instruments of violence. They are using ancient texts and ancient grievances and real, legitimate trauma to justify atrocities that have nothing to do with the survival of the Jewish people and everything to do with the political and territorial ambitions of a small group of fanatics who have managed to capture the apparatus of a state.

They are doing to Judaism what Bin Laden did to Islam, which is to make the entire world associate the religion with the worst possible expression of it, to make every Jew everywhere a presumptive defendant in a trial they did not ask for and cannot win.

And the conflation is already happening. I see it. I see it in places I did not expect to see it. I see it in the way “Zionist” has become, in some corners, a synonym for “Jew,” even though many Jews are not Zionists and many Zionists are not Jews. I see it in the way criticism of Israeli policy slides, sometimes by accident and sometimes very much on purpose, into something older and uglier. I see it in the way ordinary Jewish people are being asked to answer for things they did not do and do not support, the way Israelis who have been protesting Netanyahu in the streets for two years are being held personally responsible for his decisions, the way diaspora Jews who have nothing to do with any of this are getting bricks through their windows in cities where they have lived for generations.

I want to stop here for a second and say something about the word “Zionist,” because it has become one of the most semantically loaded words in the English language, and I find I cannot use it cleanly anymore in either direction, and I think the reason for that is worth pulling apart.

The word is anchored in two completely different histories that no longer touch each other. To most Palestinians I know, the word is the name of the thing that erased us. It describes a political project that arrived in our home, declared itself, and proceeded to dispossess my family and millions of others, and the word carries the full weight of that dispossession in every syllable. To most Jews I know, the word is the name of the thing that saved them, or that was supposed to save them, or that their parents and grandparents reached for after watching the rest of the world decide they were not worth saving. It describes self-determination, refuge, the basic human need to have somewhere to go when the world turns on you, and the word carries the full weight of that history, too.

Both of those meanings are real. Both of them are anchored in lived experience and in actual history and in the bones of actual people who are walking around right now carrying the consequences. And they do not touch. They cannot touch.

When a Palestinian says “Zionism is racism,” what a Jewish person hears is “you do not have the right to exist.”

When a Jewish person says “I am a proud Zionist,” what a Palestinian hears is “I am a proud participant in your erasure.”

The same word. Two different planets. A dialogue of the deaf that has been going on for so long that nobody on either side trusts the other to be hearing the actual words coming out of their mouth.

And it gets worse, because the word has not just split along the Palestinian/Jewish fault line. It has stretched, on the Jewish side alone, to cover such a comically incompatible range of human positions that it has effectively stopped meaning anything at all to me.

There is the one-state, fully-equal-rights, pro-Palestinian-liberation Jewish leftist in Brooklyn whose Zionism, as she will patiently explain to you over coffee if you give her the chance, is nothing more elaborate than the conviction that Jewish people, after several thousand years of being chased from one country to the next and periodically slaughtered along the way, have a reasonable interest in somewhere on earth where they get to feel safe in their own skin.

And there is Bezalel Smotrich, who refers to himself, on the record, in front of cameras, as a proud fascist, and who has spent his entire political career advocating for the formal annexation of the West Bank, the permanent disenfranchisement of its inhabitants, and the eventual “voluntary” transfer of Palestinians out of land he believes was deeded to him personally by a deity in a book.

And there is the Kahanist wing, which I am not even going to dignify with a paraphrase, because the source material speaks for itself and the source material is genocidal.

And all three of these people, the Brooklyn leftist and the fascist finance minister and the Kahanist street-thug-turned-cabinet-member, are described, by themselves and by others, using the same seven-letter word.

That is not a word doing work. That is a word that has been asked to carry too much and has buckled under the load. If you have to spend the first three sentences of any conversation explaining which kind of Zionist you are, and the next three sentences explaining which kind you are not, and the three after that explaining why the kind you are has nothing in common with the kind that is currently bombing apartment blocks, then the word is no longer a description of your position. It is an obstacle you have to clear before you are allowed to say what you actually think. That is a tax on your own speech, and you are paying it for the privilege of using a word that no longer reliably communicates anything to anyone.

The same is true of a phrase like “Free Palestine.” To me, it is a call for the basic human dignity of my people to live in their own country with their own government on their own land. To some of my Jewish friends, it is a call for their cousins in Tel Aviv to be driven into the sea. We are using the same words. We are not having the same conversation.

I mostly do not use the word “Zionist” anymore, and I want to be honest about why, which is not because I have softened on the political project the word historically described but because the word itself has stopped functioning as a description and started functioning as a flag. The moment I deploy it, the ‘how’ of ‘how I deploy it’ signals which tribe I belong to, and the conversation is over before it has started, and nothing I say after that will be heard, because the listener has already filed me into a category and stopped processing actual sentences.

That is not language doing its job. That is language failing, and the failure is being weaponized by people on both sides who would rather have the satisfaction of the flag than the difficulty of the conversation.

Words can be weapons or bridges. Most of the words we are using right now are weapons. Some of them used to be bridges. Some of them might be bridges again.

But that requires precision, which requires care, which requires the willingness to hear what the other person is actually trying to say underneath the word they have chosen, and we are in a moment where almost nobody on any side has the patience for that kind of listening.

Here is the thing
that I cannot stop
thinking about…

The bitter little symmetry that history has cooked up and served to all of us in the last eighteen months: the exact same nonsense that was weaponized against people like me after 9/11 and after 10/7 is now being weaponized against Jewish people, and a lot of the same people who deployed it the first time are now on the receiving end of it, and a lot of the people who are deploying it now were on the receiving end of it the first time, and almost nobody seems to notice the inversion or learn anything from it.

After 9/11, the question we got, constantly, was “Do you condemn Al-Qaeda? Do you condemn Bin Laden? Do you condemn jihadism? Do you condemn whatever it is I just saw on Fox News this morning that has me looking at you sideways at this dinner party?” The list was infinite, and the test was rigged. Condemn one thing, and the next was queued up. Hesitate for a second, even to ask a clarifying question, even to point out you had already condemned that thing nineteen times this week, and the hesitation was the answer. The condemnation tax. The loyalty oath. The shibboleth you had to recite, on demand, in the right order, with the right inflection, or you were suspect.

That was the old version, and it ground us down for twenty years, and most of the people reading this will remember it the way you remember a smell from a house you used to live in. Faintly. From a distance. As something that happened to other people, in another decade, when the world was different.

But you do not have to reach back twenty years for the version that matters, because the same machine got switched on again on October 8th, 2023.

The morning after October 7th, before the bodies in Israel had been counted and long before the bodies in Gaza had started piling up, every Arab and every Muslim and every Palestinian I know was on the clock again. “Do you condemn Hamas? Do you condemn what happened at the Nova festival? Do you condemn the kidnappings? Do you condemn October 7th specifically, in those words, in that order, before you are allowed to say anything else about anything else, including the thing that is about to happen to your family in Gaza which has not started yet but which we both know is coming?”

It was the post-9/11 shibboleth, recompiled and redeployed, with the names changed and the urgency cranked up. Same structure. Same trap. Same rigged test. The condemnation of Hamas was never going to be enough, because the condemnation was never the point. The point was the demand. The point was the position you had to assume in order to make the demand stop, which was the position of someone whose humanity was conditional on continuous public performance.

A lot of the people administering that test, in my personal experience, were Jewish. Not all of them. Not most of them, as I have been at pains to say. Plenty of Jewish institutions and individuals were doing the exact opposite in those same weeks, writing the open letters, organizing the ceasefire rallies, getting arrested in the Capitol rotunda with prayer shawls over their shoulders, and I am not going to pretend they were not there or that their work did not matter, because it was there and it did.

But a meaningful and vocal segment of American Jewish institutional life was, in those weeks, extremely, enthusiastically, publicly invested in making sure that every Arab and every Muslim and every Palestinian in the country was kept in a permanent posture of having to denounce things they had no connection to, before being permitted to grieve things that were being done to people they loved.

The ADL did it. AIPAC and its flunkies did it. Hundreds of pundits and politicians and op-ed writers did it.

And it worked, in the sense that it made our lives harder and our grief smaller and our voices quieter at exactly the moment we needed our voices most, which was the point.

And now…

And now…

The same shibboleth, the same condemnation tax, the same impossible loyalty oath, is being administered to Jewish people from the other direction. “Do you condemn Israel? Do you condemn Zionism? Do you condemn Netanyahu? Do you condemn the IDF? Do you condemn the bombing of Gaza? Do you condemn whatever it is I just saw on Twitter that has me looking at you sideways at this dinner party?”

Same structure. Same trap. Same rigged test. The moment you condemn one thing, the next thing is queued up. The moment you hesitate, your hesitation is the answer. Jewish students at universities are being asked to perform the loyalty oath before they are allowed to participate in clubs they have belonged to for years. Jewish writers are being asked to recite the condemnation before they are allowed to publish on unrelated topics. Jewish people who have spent their entire lives opposing the occupation are being lumped in with its architects because they did not denounce Israel in the right tone of voice on the right day of the week.

It is the same fucking thing. It is identical. It is the same lazy, vicious, cowardly logic that demands an entire community account for the actions of its worst members, and it was wrong when it was done to us and it is wrong when it is done to them, and the cruelest part is that some of the people doing it now are doing it specifically because it was done to them or to people they know, as if the way to make the world more just is to redistribute the injustice more evenly.

As if the right answer to having been collectively punished is to collectively punish someone else.

As if the lesson of having been the target of a shibboleth is that shibboleths are now okay, as long as you get to administer them.

Yes. The scale is not the same. Yes. The state power is not the same. Yes. The body count is not the same.

I am not making that argument.

I am making a smaller and more specific argument about the logic of the shibboleth, which travels even when the histories don’t.

The people who benefit from conflation are always the same people. The Bin Ladens and the Netanyahus and the Trumps and the Khameneis, the men who need their populations to see the other side as a monolithic threat so that the war can continue, so that the power can be held, so that the dissent can be crushed under the weight of perceived existential necessity. Every time we flatten, we feed them. Every time we refuse to flatten, we starve them a little. That is the math. That is the only math that has ever worked.

Zadie Smith wrote an essay about this for the New Yorker in 2024, called “Shibboleth,” and the title is the right title. The biblical shibboleth, the original one, comes from Judges 12: a password used to identify members of one tribe and execute the members of another, based on how they pronounced a single word. People who said it wrong got their throats cut at the river. That is the literal etymology. A linguistic test designed not to find truth but to find enemies, with death as the consequence of failure.

Smith’s argument was that we are now drowning in shibboleths. Words and phrases and required denunciations whose function is not to clarify thought but to sort people into camps so they can be punished or rewarded accordingly. “Do you condemn Hamas.” “Do you condemn Zionism.” “From the river to the sea.” “Settler colonialism.” “Self-defense.” The phrases themselves are not the problem. The problem is the demand that you produce them on cue, in the right order, to the right audience, as proof of membership. The problem is that the production of the phrase has replaced the actual work of thinking about the thing the phrase refers to. The problem is that failure to recite the shibboleth correctly is now treated, in too many quarters, as evidence that you should be excommunicated, fired, deplatformed, or in some cases throat-cut at the river.

Smith got pilloried for the essay, and watching it happen in real time was one of the more frustrating things I witnessed in 2024, because the people doing the pillorying were, almost to a person, demonstrating exactly the dynamic she was writing about.

She made a careful, complicated argument about the dangers of using language as a loyalty test, and the response was a loyalty test. She declined to recite the required phrases in the required order, and she was excommunicated for it. The irony was so perfect it should have been embarrassing for the people administering the punishment, but irony does not work on people who have already decided that nuance is a form of betrayal.

I read her essay when it came out and I understood what she was trying to do.

She was trying to say: be careful with these words, because words matter, because the moment we start using them as tribal markers instead of as descriptions of reality, we have stopped thinking and started sorting, and the sorting always ends somewhere ugly.

That is a hard thing to say in a moment when people are dying and the temptation to sort is overwhelming, and she said it anyway, and she paid for it, and the way she paid for it proved her right. That is the cruelest thing you can do to a writer, which is to demonstrate the validity of her thesis by punishing her for stating it.

So no, I am not going to distance myself from Smith’s essay. I think she was largely right, I think the parts of it people objected to were mostly misread or read in bad faith, and I think the fact that she was monstered by people who claimed to share her broad politics is itself one of the strongest pieces of evidence that her diagnosis was correct.

The shibboleth machine eats its own.
It always has. It always will.

And the only defense against it is to refuse to participate, which is what she tried to do, and what I am trying to do now.

It is not okay. It was not okay then. It is not okay now.

The condemnation tax is a tool of small minds and bad-faith arguments, and every time we accept it as a legitimate way of doing politics, we entrench the principle that some people have to perform their decency in advance of being permitted to participate in public life, and that principle has only ever been used to make life worse for whoever is currently out of fashion.

Today it is Jews. Yesterday it was us. Tomorrow it will be someone else. The tool does not care who is holding it. It just keeps cutting.

I want to be very careful here, because there is a trap in writing this kind of essay, and the trap is the “good Jew” framing, the implicit sorting of Jewish people into the ones who pass my personal moral test and the ones who don’t, as if I am qualified to administer such a test, as if anyone is.

I am not interested in that. I refuse it.

Jewish people, like Arab people, like Muslim people, like every other community on earth, contain the full standard human distribution of angels and assholes, saints and shitheads, brave people and cowards, the principled and the opportunistic, the cruel and the kind, and the proportions are roughly the same as in any other group, because there is nothing magical or cursed about being Jewish, just as there is nothing magical or cursed about being Arab.

Communities are made of people. People are complicated. Anyone who tells you a community is uniformly anything is selling you something, and what they are usually selling you is permission to hate or permission to absolve.

What I am saying is NOT “there are good Jews and bad Jews.”

What I am saying is: there is no such thing as a community that can be held collectively responsible for the actions of its worst members, and the moment you start doing that to anyone, you have abandoned the basic moral premise that makes coexistence possible. I have been living that lesson since 9/11. I have been living it again since October 7th.

I am not going to forget it now, and I am not going to participate in inflicting it on anyone else, no matter how much the current moment tempts me to.

The temptation is real. I want to be honest about that.

When you watch what is happening in Gaza, what has been happening for two years, what is happening in Iran tonight, what has been happening in the West Bank for decades, the temptation to flatten, to generalize, to assign collective guilt, is enormous. It is the path of least resistance. It feels good in the short term. It satisfies something in the wounded animal part of the brain.

And it is wrong.

It is wrong when it is done to Arabs, and it is wrong when it is done to Jews, and it is wrong when it is done to anyone, and the wrongness does not become rightness because the wound is recent or the grief is fresh or the cause is just.

Here is the thing I need to say clearly, because I do not want any of the above to be misread as some kind of softening, some kind of retreat from positions I hold with my whole self. I have not moved an inch on Palestine. Not one inch.

The Palestinian people have a right to live free, safe, sovereign, and fully at home on the land they have lived on for generations. Not under the Swiss-cheese Bantustan fiction currently being administered in the West Bank, with its checkpoints and its settler-only roads and its permit regimes and its house demolitions and its land theft dressed up in legal language. Not in Gaza, an open-air prison that has now become an open-air graveyard. Real freedom. Real safety. Real sovereignty over their own lives. The right to control the water they drink, the air they breathe, the borders they cross, and the future they build. The right to defend themselves. The right to exist on the same terms as every other people on earth, including the people currently occupying them.

That is not to me a negotiable outcome, nor has it ever been one.

And nothing I have written here, none of my refusal to flatten Jewish people, none of my acknowledgment of the trap that is being laid for them, should be read as a step back from that position.

It is precisely because I refuse to flatten that I am able to hold all of it at once.

I can say Netanyahu is the architect of catastrophic crimes, and also say that not every Jew is Netanyahu.

I can say the Israeli state is conducting itself in ways that violate every principle of international humanitarian law, and also say that the Israeli people are not a monolith and that many of them have been in the streets for two years trying to stop the men running their country from doing what those men are now doing.

I can say Hamas committed atrocities on October 7th that I will not soften and will not contextualize away and will not file under "resistance" as if the word "resistance" launders a music festival massacre, and also say that not every Palestinian is Hamas, that most Palestinians I know loathe Hamas and have loathed them for years, that the people of Gaza did not vote for the men currently using them as human shields, and that the children buried under the rubble of Khan Younis did not get a ballot.

I can say that there are men in keffiyehs who have done monstrous things in the name of my people and that the monstrousness is not redeemed by the keffiyeh, and also say that the existence of those men does not retroactively justify the flattening of fourteen million Palestinians into a single threat to be managed.

I can say that there are men in IDF uniforms who have done monstrous things in the name of the Jewish people and that the monstrousness is not redeemed by the trauma of the grandparents, and also say that the existence of those men does not retroactively justify the flattening of fifteen million Jews worldwide into a single threat to be managed.

I can demand the end of the occupation, the end of the siege, the end of the settlements, the recognition of Palestinians as a free people on the land, all of it, the whole package, no concessions, no half-measures, and also demand an end to violence and terrorism against Israelis and Jews, and the prosecution of the men who planned and carried out October 7th by any court that will hear the case, and also say that holding every Jewish person on earth responsible for the policies of a government most of them did not vote for and many of them actively oppose is exactly the same logic that was used to make my life hell after 9/11 and exactly the same logic that has been used to make Palestinian life hell for seventy-seven years, and I am not going to participate in it from any direction.

These are not contradictions. They are the basic prerequisites of any moral position worth holding.

If your support for Palestinians requires you to flatten Jews, your support is not principled; it is just bigotry with a cause it likes attached.

If your support for Israelis requires you to flatten Palestinians, same thing, same problem, same diagnosis.

The hard work, the actual work, the only work that gets us anywhere, is holding the line on both at the same time. Refusing to dehumanize anyone. Refusing to collectively punish anyone. Insisting on the full humanity, the full rights, the full sovereignty of both peoples, simultaneously, without trade-offs, without one being contingent on the other, without anyone having to earn their humanity by performing acceptable politics.

I have lived my life paying the cost of conflation with the worst people who share identity markers with me. I am watching the same conflation happen now to a different community, and I am writing this essay to say: I see it, I refuse it, and I am asking everyone else who lived through the last round to refuse it too.

Not because Jews need my protection, but because the principle matters.

Because the moment we start saying “well, this group earned the collective punishment, this group’s flattening is justified,” we have given up the only moral ground worth standing on, and we have handed the people who want endless war exactly what they need to keep it going.

I am Palestinian. I want my people to be free. I want them to be safe. I want them to have a home. I want the occupation to end and the siege to end and the bombing to end and the settlements to be dismantled and the prisoners to be released and the dead to be mourned and the survivors to be allowed to live, finally, after seventy-seven years, like human beings, on the land. And I want all of that for Jewish people too, on the same land, in the same breath, with the same insistence. And for all of that, I do not apologize.

I do not apologize for wanting it all, and I am not going to pretend to want less to make anyone comfortable.

And I want it without becoming the thing that was done to me. I want it without flattening anyone. I want it without participating in the conflation that I know, from personal and bitter experience, is the first step toward atrocity.

I am begging you to read this because I do not know how else to say it anymore, and the alternative is to let the shibboleths win, and I have watched the shibboleths win over and over in my life already, and I am not going to stand quietly while they win again.

Both things.
At the same time.
Always.

That is the assignment.
It has always been the assignment.

And the only way through this
is for enough of us, on all sides,
to refuse to fail it.